Related papers: Towards Physarum robots: computing and manipulatin…
In this talk I discuss the general question of the portability of Molecular Dynamics codes for diffusive systems on parallel computers of the APE family. The intrinsic single precision arithmetics of the today available APE platforms does…
Softening and onboarding computers and controllers is one of the final frontiers in soft robotics towards their robustness and intelligence for everyday use. In this regard, embodying soft and physical computing presents exciting potential.…
Real-life control tasks involve matters of various substances---rigid or soft bodies, liquid, gas---each with distinct physical behaviors. This poses challenges to traditional rigid-body physics engines. Particle-based simulators have been…
In the application of underwater creature study, comparing with propeller-powered ROVs and servo motor actuated robotic fish, novel biomimetic fish robot designs with soft actuation structure could interact with aquatic creatures closely…
Constructing a surface that is an integral part of the function of tribosystems (deterministic surface) is an intriguing goal. Inspirations for such surfaces come from studying natural systems and deducing design rules. The major attraction…
Robot swarms can be tasked with a variety of automated sensing and inspection applications in aerial, aquatic, and surface environments. In this paper, we study a simplified two-outcome surface inspection task. We task a group of robots to…
The dynamics of membranes, shells and capsules in fluid flow has become an active research area in computational physics and computational biology. The small thickness of these elastic materials enables their efficient approximation as a…
The recently observed plasmonic skyrmions, as electromagnetic counterparts of topologically stable quasiparticles, hold significant promise as novel carriers for robust information transfer and manipulation of nontrivial light-matter…
This paper introduces a system of data collection acceleration and real-to-sim transferring for surface recognition on a quadruped robot. The system features a mechanical single-leg setup capable of stepping on various easily…
The topologically protected magnetic spin configurations known as skyrmions offer promising applications due to their stability, mobility and localization. In this work, we emphasize how to leverage the thermally driven dynamics of an…
The connection between fundamental interactions acting in molecules in a fluid and macroscopically measured properties, such as the viscosity between colloidal particles coated with polymers, is studied here. The role that hydrodynamic and…
Quadrupeds are robots that have been of interest in the past few years due to their versatility in navigating across various terrain and utility in several applications. For quadrupeds to navigate without a predefined map a priori, they…
This paper proposes a cooperative environmental learning algorithm working in a fully distributed manner. A multi-robot system is more effective for exploration tasks than a single robot, but it involves the following challenges: 1) online…
Given the task of positioning a ball-like object to a goal region beyond direct reach, humans can often throw, slide, or rebound objects against the wall to attain the goal. However, enabling robots to reason similarly is non-trivial.…
Traditional locomotion strategies become ineffective at low Reynolds numbers, where viscous forces predominate over inertial forces. To adapt, microorganisms have evolved specialized structures like cilia and flagella for efficient…
Deploying humanoid robots to interact with real-world environments--such as carrying objects or sitting on chairs--requires generalizable, lifelike motions and robust scene perception. Although prior approaches have advanced each capability…
Physical computing has emerged as a powerful tool for performing intelligent tasks directly in the mechanical domain of functional materials and robots, reducing our reliance on the more traditional COMS computers. However, no systematic…
Belgium is amongst few artificial countries, established on purpose, when Dutch and French speaking parts were joined in a single unit. This makes Belgium a particularly interesting testbed for studying bio-inspired techniques for…
The study of biological systems witnessed a pervasive cross-fertilization between experimental investigation and computational methods. This gave rise to the development of new methodologies, able to tackle the complexity of biological…
The Physalis method is suitable for the simulation of flows with suspended spherical particles. It differs from standard immersed boundary methods due to the use of a local spectral representation of the solution in the neighborhood of each…